User:Magical Orb
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[edit]Magical Orb understands that the quality of Wikipedia is measured as follows:
AVERAGE ARTICLE QUALITY * AVERAGE TOPIC NOTABILITY
(This value can be quickly approximated by measuring the quality and notability of a randomly selected selection of pages.)
Magical Orb concludes that Wikipedia's ultimate goal is to create a single, high-quality article on the most important of all topics. This would maximise Wikipedia's quality.
Unfortunately, the most important topic is not yet identified, and the importance of a topic cannot be assessed until an article has been written about it.
Thus, Wikipedia is in an uncomfortable growing state in which it contains many thousands of articles, many of them of low quality and notability. This is an unpleasant and unavoidable part of the search.
Once the perfect topic is found, articles on all inferior topics can be safely removed. Editors will converge on the perfect topic, and begin to craft the perfect article.
On that day, clicking on the 'Random article' button will no longer expose users to inferior articles.
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[edit]Magical Orb suggests a temporary solution to the problem of inferior articles.
Editors should select one 'best article' at any given point in time.
Attempting to access any other article should redirect visitors to the 'best article'. Likewise, clicking on the 'random page' button should redirect visitors to the 'best article'.
While the editors will be unable to perfectly select the best article 100% of the time, this system will improve the quality of Wikipedia provided the editors select an article which is better than the average article.
Of course, editors will still carry the burden of visiting and editing inferior articles, as the current 'best article' is not guaranteed to mark the perfect topic.